Built on the Defence Power
The Snowy Mountains Scheme was legislated in 1949 under the Commonwealth's defence power, because Canberra had no clear authority to build it, and was declared finished in 1974 on time and within budget. Its successor, Snowy 2.0, was announced in 2017 at a third of what it now costs and is being tunnelled through a national park.
Adaminaby is a few hundred people on the Snowy Mountains Highway, with a ten-metre fibreglass trout at the entrance and a street plan about seventy years old. The original town is under Lake Eucumbene, a few kilometres away. From 1956 the buildings that could be moved were jacked up and carted to the new site, the ones that could not were left where they stood, and the water came up behind Eucumbene Dam in 1958. In dry years the lake drops far enough that kerbstones, foundations and the occasional chimney come back out of the mud, and people drive up from Canberra to walk around in them.
That is the Snowy Mountains Scheme at its most legible. Sixteen major dams, seven power stations, a pumping station, about 145 kilometres of tunnel bored through the range, and a decision to turn two rivers inland — begun in October 1949, declared complete in 1974, on schedule and within its budget. It is the largest thing the Australian state has ever built. It is routinely described as the making of modern Australia. And the Commonwealth had no clear constitutional power to build any of it.
Section 51(vi)
Water inside a state is a state matter, and in 1949 nothing in the Constitution gave Canberra authority over the headwaters of the Snowy, the Murray or the Murrumbidgee. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Power Act 1949 was drafted instead under the defence power in section 51(vi) — the argument being that a country which had spent the previous decade at war needed generating capacity beyond the reach of a coastal attack, and that this was therefore defence infrastructure. Lawyers at the time thought the reasoning thin. New South Wales and Victoria could have taken it to the High Court and chose not to; they signed the Snowy Mountains Agreement in 1957 instead, eight years after the first blast at Adaminaby, and passed matching legislation that made the question moot. For those eight years the largest public works project in the country's history proceeded on a basis nobody wanted to test.
Who dug it
More than 100,000 people worked on the scheme across twenty-five years. Around seventy per cent were migrants, from more than thirty countries — Italians, Germans, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Norwegians, Balts, a great many of them displaced persons who arrived under postwar resettlement agreements and were bonded to two years of work wherever the government sent them. Cooma, the headquarters town, acquired a row of consulates and an avenue of flags that is still standing. One hundred and twenty-one men died: rockfalls, machinery, vehicles on ice. The scheme is now told as the founding story of Australian multiculturalism, which is true as far as it goes, and which tends to skip the fact that this was directed labour under contract, in tunnels, in a country still operating the White Australia policy and still a generation away from dismantling it.
The scheme did not set out to change the country's idea of itself. It set out to move water across a mountain range, and the rest happened because the men who did it did not go home.
The river it is named after
The Snowy rises on the eastern side of the range and used to reach the sea at Marlo in Victoria. Jindabyne Dam, finished in 1967, took most of it and sent it west under the mountains to the Murray and the Murrumbidgee, where the water makes electricity on the way down and then irrigates. Below the dam wall the flow fell to roughly one per cent of what the river had carried naturally, and for thirty years that was simply the price. In 2002, as a condition of restructuring the scheme, the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victoria signed a deed committing to return 21 per cent of average natural flow within ten years, with 28 per cent named as an aspiration. Water has gone back down the river since, in scheduled releases from a dam. Whether that reconstitutes a river or merely wets its bed is the argument they have been having in Dalgety and Orbost ever since, and hitting a percentage has never settled it.
Sold, unsold, bought back
The authority became a company, Snowy Hydro Limited, in 2002, held by New South Wales, Victoria and the Commonwealth in shares of roughly 58, 29 and 13 per cent. In 2006 all three agreed to float it. The reaction was immediate and it did not come from the cities: irrigators, shire councils, the scheme's own retired engineers and a large part of the governing Coalition's rural base treated the sale as the disposal of something that was not the government's to sell. John Howard cancelled the float in June 2006, days before it was due to go ahead. Twelve years later the Commonwealth moved the other way and bought the states out completely, paying about A$6.2 billion in 2018 for full ownership. The scheme has therefore been kept out of private hands twice, by two opposed arguments, and privatised never.
Snowy 2.0
What the Commonwealth had bought was a plan. Snowy 2.0 joins Tantangara reservoir to Talbingo with about 27 kilometres of new tunnel and an underground power station, and pumps water back uphill at night when electricity is cheap: 2,000 megawatts of output and around 350,000 megawatt-hours of storage, which is roughly a week of generation at full tilt and the reason it is described as the battery a renewable grid needs. Malcolm Turnbull announced it in March 2017. The feasibility study at the end of that year put the cost between A$3.8 and A$4.5 billion. In August 2023 Snowy Hydro said the figure was A$12 billion and the finish the end of 2028, and the date has moved again since. One of the tunnel boring machines spent most of 2023 stuck in soft ground a short distance into its drive.
All of it sits inside Kosciuszko National Park, which was declared in 1967 while the first scheme was still being built, and whose plan of management had to be amended to permit the second one. Millions of cubic metres of excavated rock are being placed within the park. Scientists have spent years arguing about whether joining Talbingo and Tantangara by tunnel will carry redfin perch, and the virus they carry, into water that has never had either. None of that is an argument against building storage the grid needs, and none of it is answered by saying so. What it means for anyone standing on the wall at Talbingo is that the same bargain is visible twice, seventy years apart: a public authority cutting through a mountain range for a public good, at a cost to a river and a park that in 1949 nobody had to state out loud, and that now has to be stated, itemised and defended before a single metre is dug.